1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computer operating platform administration and more particularly to operating platform state determination.
2. Description of the Related Art
The growth of enterprise computing has provided substantial advances in productivity for industrial and governmental entities in facilitating the use of computing resources to accomplish organizational tasks in an efficient and expeditious manner. However, the growth of enterprise computing also has given rise to an entire industry segment dedicated to the creation and administration of enterprise computing systems. In this regard, the information technology industry at its core provides for the administration and augmentation of enterprise computing systems including an underlying network architecture, nodal computing clients and servers, operating systems residing in the clients and servers, middleware and other applications executing in the operating systems.
Integral to the role of the administration of the enterprise is the determination of the state of an operating platform in the enterprise. Generally, multiple operating platforms can require state determination. To assess the state of an operating platform such as an operating system or host computing device, an administrator must manually request required state information, either through direct interaction with a console or user interface to the operating system, or remotely through a remote interface to the operating system. In either case, multiple different tools can be required to determine sundry albeit important state data such as memory, central processing unit (CPU) type, operating system versioning data, installed software, local configurations, scripts, scripts executed by other scripts, dependencies and the like.
Thus, assembling a complete listing of state data for an operating platform can be a manual and hence tedious process. Further, the degree of expertise requisite for an administrator using the different tools to acquire the state information can be substantial. Even knowing the requisite state data to be acquired can depend solely on the depth of expertise held by an administrator. In any event, as different administrators cycle out of an organization to seek a different role or different employment, much of this expertise can be lost.